“I admit he needs a little handling but he has a lot to give.” (David Astor, 22 Nov. 1942)
The proprietor and editor of the Observer newspaper, David Astor (1912-2001), was an important figure in the story of George Orwell’s professional and personal life; nor can the significance of Orwell in Astor’s be underestimated.
They first met in 1941, just after Orwell had commenced working at the BBC. Cyril Connolly, who had a brief reign as literary editor at the Observer, recommended Astor read Orwell’s essay, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941) and introduced the two Old Etonians shortly afterwards. Astor later said that he felt he had known Orwell “all my life he was so straightforward”.
Orwell, who became one of Astor’s closest friends, would write one hundred book reviews and news articles for the Observer between 1942-1948. He was instrumental in assisting Astor to implement a more liberal vision for the newspaper his father had purchased.
The Observer, established in 1791, although enjoying a long and venerable history, had grown staid and stale under the reign of J.L. Garvin, the long-running editor since 1908. Reports at the time indicated that Garvin, a Conservative, had quit the Observer in February 1942 as it was being turned over to Lord Waldorf Astor‘s son David, a “socialist, Laborite [and] ex-factory worker”. An editorial, published on the 1st November 1942, set a new direction for the newspaper. Astor was not the editor at this time but played a major role in crafting the policy in the months after Garvin was forced to resign:
“THE OBSERVER is not a Party paper. It is tied to no group, no sect, no interest. It belongs to no combine of journals. Its independence is absolute. But merely to stand alone, challenging and bracing as that attitude may be, is not enough. One must also stand for a system of ideas and for a pattern of constructive reform. Not to be bound by Party or personal ties makes allegiance to declared principle all the more necessary.”
On the 11th December 1942, in a letter to the new editor, Ivor Brown, Astor explained his admiration for Orwell whom he considered:
“… one of that small set of intelligent Englishmen who felt so anti-Fascist that they went to fight in Spain – and have never received any recognition in England for their prescience and courage”.
Two previously unknown letters to Astor – not included in the twenty-volume, Complete Works of George Orwell – are vintage Orwell. The first of these letters was written from Canonbury Square on the 19th March 1946; the second, from Barnhill, on the 16th July 1947. His greatest passions, during the period immediately after the conclusion of the Second World War – his son, his friends, his garden, literature and writing – are omnipresent!
19th March 1946
This letter from Orwell to his friend and patron includes a list of “suggestions for reviewers as The Observer expands”. Orwell, who was a lifelong enthusiast for lists, believed that none of them except Tosco Fyvel had written for the Observer previously. Reflecting and researching these suggestions – as several of the names were completely unknown to me and do not feature in Orwell’s correspondence or diaries – has led to a deeper appreciation of the breadth of his friends and associates during the 1940s.
The letter also includes more domestic information about his “offensively well” son. Richard Blair had been successfully toilet-trained!
The “Stonier” mentioned is George Walter Stonier (1903-1985) who was a novelist, radio playwright, critic and literary editor at The New Statesman. He ended-up writing for the Observer too, as did some of the individuals on the list Orwell provided Astor!
LITERARY
Julian Symons (1912-1994) needs little introduction to students of George Orwell’s life and work. After the war, Symons worked as an advertising copywriter, inheriting, from Orwell, the weekly book page in the Manchester Evening News. A industrious poet, novelist and critic, his own publications were regularly reviewed in the Observer but he does not appear to have contributed to the newspaper.
Rayner Heppenstall (1911-1981) is another literary figure well-known to Orwell devotees. A novelist, poet, diarist and BBC radio producer, he was infamously beaten-up with a shooting-stick by Orwell after coming home drunk to the flat they shared. Heppenstall did write occasional reviews for Astor up until the early 1960s. His memories of Orwell can be found in Four Absentees.
Hugh Gordon Porteous (1906–1993) was an artist and critic. He contributed reviews and articles to New English Weekly and was so prolific that his writing appeared in every edition of the periodical from 1935 to 1938. Porteous was an early critic and admirer of Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957). Jeffrey Meyers, in his biography of Orwell, includes and interesting anecdote from Porteous about Wyndham Lewis and Orwell’s failure to fact-check a rumour before spreading it in a column. Orwell wrote further to Astor about his recommendations on 30th January 1947:
“I forget, by the way, whether, when I gave you that list of likely writers, I included Hugh Gordon Porteous, who at that time was still in the army but is now loose again and is, I think, looking for free-lance work. He was before the war a very interesting critical writer with some rather unusual specialised knowledge, such as, for instance, being able to read Chinese. There was also G. S. Frazer, whose name I think I did give you. He wrote to me recently asking for advice and I sent him along to Tribune, and also I think [I] told him there might possibly be reviewing for him on the Observer. I don’t know whether he has approached you, but I told him that he might use my name. He again was, in my opinion, a very promising writer, but he was swallowed up in the army for about six years.”
G.S. Frazer (1915-1980) was a Scottish poet, critic and academic. Orwell’s recommendation led to Frazer reviewing for the newspaper from 1948-1975. Orwell had previously recommended him for Partisan Review in a letter to Philip Rahv (dated 14 October, 1943) along with Kathleen Raine and Roy Fuller.
Roy Fuller (1912-1991) was a poet and later wrote crime fiction. Julian Symons championed his early poetry and Orwell reviewed some of his poems in 1943, describing them as “sincere” but “laboured”. Fuller was elected professor of poetry at Oxford University for the period 1968-1973. No articles or reviews written by Fuller have been located in the Observer.
Kathleen Raine (1908-2003) was a poet, critic, scholar and a leading expert on William Blake and W.B. Yeats. She was also pleasingly contrarian, refusing literary honours well into old-age. Astor employed her to write reviews. Her insights into the English mystics, along with her commentary on William Empson and his work are particularly interesting. Raine’s anecdote about Orwell is worth noting:
“But on the whole I have kept my vow to do nothing for money I would not have done for its own sake. I remember once saying something to George Orwell about those with inner wealth not caring so much about the material kind; thinking, no doubt, of my father’s people and their unworldly values; and he replied, ‘Yes, but those with material wealth don’t have the same need of the inner kind.’ At the time I saw in this only a paradox of wit; it did not occur to me then, nor for years after, that there could be human beings above the level of the blindest ignorance who could seriously prefer material to immaterial riches.”
Norman Cameron ? (1905-1953) was a poet, translator and copywriter who Orwell used to drink with in Fitzrovia during the war. Cameron was a friend and disciple of Robert Graves. He does not appear to have written for the Observer.
Alex Comfort (1920-2000) was a physician and pacifist who drank with Orwell in Fitzrovia. Orwell reviewed his work and they exchanged letters. He became very internationally famous after the publication of The Joy of Sex (1972). Comfort later appeared on another of Orwell’s lists.
Anthony Powell (1905-2000) needs no introduction to Orwellians.
George Woodcock (1912-1995) was an anarchist and conscientious objector who does not appear to have written for the Observer. He edited sixteen issues of his own magazine, Now (1940-1947). Woodcock was critical of Orwell working for the BBC. Orwell’s response to his challenge on the 2nd December 1942 is an important one:
As to the ethics of b’casting & in general letting oneself be used by the British governing class. It’s of little value to argue about it, it is chiefly a question of whether one considers it more important to down the Nazis first or whether one believes doing this is meaningless unless one achieves one’s own revolution first. But for heaven’s sake don’t think I don’t see how they are using me. A subsidiary point is that one can’t effectively remain outside the war & by working inside an institution like the BBC one can perhaps deodorise it to some small extent. I doubt whether I shall stay in this job very much longer, but while here I consider I have kept our propaganda slightly less disgusting than it might otherwise have been.
From 1942 Woodcock worked with the Freedom Press, the main British publisher of anarchist material, producing many articles and pamphlets. In 1945, when three of the editors of its paper War Commentary were imprisoned for anti-war activity, he helped to keep the paper going while they were in prison, founding the Freedom Defence Committee on behalf of dissenters. Woodcock’s book, The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell (1966), is an essential primary source for understanding Orwell and his work.
Frank O’Connor ? (1903-1966) was an Irish poet and translator who does not appear in Orwell’s correspondence. There is one positive review from Orwell in the Manchester Evening News (27 September 1945) of a book O’Connor translated from the Irish. He does not seem to have reviewed for the Observer.
Jack Lindsay (1900-1990) was a communist, life-long vegetarian and prolific writer. The brother of Norman Lindsay, the Australian artist, he and Orwell did not correspond. Orwell was clearly very intellectually engaged with his ideas, as revealed in this review of Perspective for Poetry (and is very fair considering the writer’s ideological beliefs) in the Manchester Evening News (30 November 1944):
“He is dealing with almost exactly the same subject—the position of the poet in present-day society—but his short pamphlet contrives also to be a compressed history of the literary movement from the last war onwards, with some backward glances at earlier periods. It must be one of the ablest pieces of Marxist literary criticism that have been written for some years past…
In very broad terms there is little doubt that Mr. Lindsay’s theory is correct, but one has to be on one’s guard against his political loyalties…
A writer who joins the Communist party is involved, sometimes quite directly, in the sordid game of power politics, and there are various issues on which it is very difficult for him to write what he knows to be the truth. He can, of course, toe the line, but at a fearful intellectual price. This accounts for the fact—and it ought not to be a fact if Mr. Lindsay’s theory were quite watertight—that over a quarter of a century the whole Communist movement has produced so little worthwhile literature. But that does not invalidate Mr. Lindsay’s main theory. The poet is most free, least isolated from his fellows, when he is helping the historical process along—that much one can accept while disagreeing with Mr. Lindsay about the exact nature and tempo of the historical process. This is a good pamphlet, and an effective counterblast against the frank declarations of irresponsibility that have been made by various young poets recently.”
R.C. Churchill (1916-1986) revised the third edition of the Concise Cambridge History of English Literature (1970) and was expert in the scholarly work on Charles Dickens. A copy of his book published in 1955, A Short History of the Future, sits on my shelf. It includes a map of the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four) which English teachers have had in their resource folders (usually without the source) for over fifty years. Secker & Warburg published his book, Disagreements: A Polemic on Culture in the English Democracy, in 1950. Some reviewers compared his work favourably with Orwell’s.
Glebe Struve (1898-1985) wrote on Russian literature and Orwell read, Twenty-five Years of Soviet Russian Literature, where he discovered the origins of Yevgeny Zamyatin‘s dystopian novel, We. He and Orwell corresponded regularly. Struve published reviews in the Observer as early as 1934.
Elizaveta Fen/Lydia Jackson (1899-1983) was a novelist, autobiographer, translator and child psychologist. She met Orwell’s first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy (1905-1944), at University College London in 1934 while they were studying educational psychology. She had a complex relationship with Orwell and published a twelve-page article, ‘George Orwell’s First Wife’, in The Twentieth Century (1960). The pair corresponded from 1939 until 1949.
Alan Moray Williams (1915-) was a journalist and prolific translator of Russian fairy tales, poetry and other texts into English. Williams was sure that Orwell had not read We in any language until 1944 when he lent him a copy of the French translation (Nous Autres). Orwell wrote encouragingly to Williams in March 1944:
“I certainly think you are a suitable applicant for the Atlantic Award, and if my recommendation is of any use, you are welcome to it. I have watched your work during the past two years or more and considered that what you were doing, in translating Russian verse and bringing little-known Russian writers to the attention of the British public, was of the greatest value. I also well know that work of that description is not well paid, and it is in my mind that when I was sub-editing “Tribune” we could only afford to pay you ten shillings for the poems you used to translate. One can’t keep alive on that kind of thing, and you are clearly the sort of person who deserves financial help during the early part of his career. I hope your application will come to something.”
Paul Potts (1911-1990) was a Canadian poet and author. He visited Orwell on Jura and was the last person to see him alive in the hospital at University College London. He looked through the window, saw Orwell was asleep and left a gift of a packet of tea at the door. Potts wrote an insightful piece about his friend, ‘Don Quixote on a Bicycle’.
HISTORY/POLITICS/SOCIOLOGY
Franz Borkenau (1900-1957) was an Austrian who had grown disillusioned with communism after his first youthful flush of enthusiasm in the 1920s. Orwell greatly admired his book, The Spanish Cockpit (1937) saying in a review that “anyone who wants to understand the Spanish situation should read the really brilliant final chapter, entitled Conclusions.”
Arturo Barea (1897-1957) was an exiled Spanish writer, literary critic and broadcaster. He wrote the 10th title in the Searchlight Books series, Struggle for the Spanish Soul. He published articles and short stories in Horizon, Time and Tide, New Statesman, Times Literary Supplement and Tribune. He was also a regular broadcaster for the BBC Latin American Service under the pen-name ‘Juan de Castilla’. Barea authored an autobiographical trilogy, The Forging of a Rebel, which was first published in English by Faber & Faber (1941-1946) and edited by T.S. Eliot. These books were translated by his wife, Ilsa Barea, and reviewed positively by Orwell.
Ilsa Barea (1902-1973) was an Austrian born in Vienna where she had studied political sciences at university. She met and married the Arturo Barea during the Spanish Civil War and afterwards they settled in England. During World War II she worked in the BBC Monitoring Service. She translated over twenty books into English.
Catherine Andrassy (1892-1985) was a Hungarian aristocrat married to Michael Károlyi (1875-1955), prime minister of the short-lived First Hungarian Republic. The chapter in Károlyi’s memoir detailing their experiences in London during World War Two is contextually interesting (his wife, who was taught English by her British governess before learning Hungarian, was the translator). Catherine’s own memoir reveals how she met first Orwell and other literary luminaries from the 1940s:
When off duty, I would spend the long evenings of the blackout immersed in the stimulating literary magazine Horizon. It had an adventurous, cosmopolitan spirit and included many then unknown foreign writers among its contributors. Cyril Connolly’s ‘Comments’ were always exciting, and the articles containing something unusual and at times challenging, provoking contradiction, acted on me as an escape from wartime worries. Every month we would wait impatiently for its arrival. One day I was roused to indignation by a laudatory review of Montherlant’s novel Pitie aux Femmes, for which I had the greatest dislike. Nothing is so satisfactory or so appeasing to one’s temper than to discharge ones feelings on paper, and, although I had no hopes that it would be published, I dashed off a rejoinder. It was a great surprise to open the next issue and find my article in it. Shortly afterwards I received an invitation from Cyril Connolly to review Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler’s momentous work, which had kept Michael and me awake for several nights. Now we got in touch with the Horizon group, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice and the literati of those days, Alex Comfort, Arthur Koestler and the fascinating Diana Witherby. The parties at Connolly’s studio were crowded with beautiful women, brilliant men, strong drink and much gossip.
Some years later, having read my reviews in Horizon, George Orwell, whom I had always admired for his humanism and intellectual integrity called on me at Hampstead. I can still see vividly his gaunt, Don Quixote-like figure, bent as he climbed the low-ceilinged staircase in our minute Queen Anne house. He had just taken over on Tribune and invited me to be one of their reviewers, but as we were soon leaving for Hungary I could not accept his offer. I visited him two years later in a clinic near Oxford, a few months before his death.
John Morris (1895-1980) met Orwell at the BBC in February 1943 when they were both Talks Producers. Morris was to become the head of the Far Eastern Service for a decade prior to his appointment as the controller of the Third Programme until his retirement in 1958. He was one of the first to publish his memories of Orwell; ‘Some are more equal than others’ appeared in Penguin New Writing in 1950. Morris and Orwell did not get on and his is an unsympathetic view of Orwell (which you can read here). Despite this, Orwell was still prepared to recommend Morris to Astor. Morris had an active life in the military and his experience of India is of interest.
T.R. Fyvel (1907-1985) was introduced to Orwell, one of his heroes, by their mutual publisher Fredric Warburg, in January 1940. Like Orwell, Fyvel’s book had been rejected by Victor Gollancz resulting in both of being published by Secker and Warburg. That meeting took place at the St John’s Wood home of Hans Lothar, a German-Jewish exile who had been deputy editor of a leading German liberal newspaper. Orwell reminded Fyvel of the British colonial officials he had met in the Middle East; he looked like “a seedy Sahib”. In 1945, Fyvel succeeded Orwell as literary editor of the Tribune newspaper. Fyvel’s personal memoir of Orwell is an exceptionally important primary source.
Evelyn Anderson (1909-1977) was an Austrian refugee, educated in Frankfurt, who had various editorial roles at Tribune (1945-1952). Orwell reviewed her book, Hammer or Anvil: The Story of the German Working-Class Movement (1945) in the Manchester Evening News (30 August 1945). He described her (in a letter to Philip Rahv on 16 September 1946) as “a very gifted woman” whose “interests are almost purely political” noting that “she doesn’t write awfully well”.
Reg Groves (1908-1988) was the assistant at Booklovers’ Corner – the Hampstead bookshop, immortalised in Orwell’s, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and the essay, ‘Bookshop Memories’ (1936) – immediately prior to Orwell’s tenure. Groves was a Communist, Trotskyist, Christian Socialist, Labour Historian and Labour Party Parliamentary Candidate. No reviews in The Observer have come to hand.
F.A. Ridley ? (1897-1994) does not appear to have corresponded with Orwell but was a signatory to causes they both subscribed ie. Freedom Defence Committee.
Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) was a chemist-turned-philosopher who co-founded the Society for Freedom in Science in 1941. They do not appear to have corresponded. Orwell wrote approvingly of his book, The Contempt of Freedom: The Russian Experiment and After (1940):
“Professor Michael Polanyi of Manchester University, who studied conditions in the U.S.S.R. over a number of years and subjected the Webb’s famous book, “Soviet Communism—a New Civilisation?” to some searching criticism.”
SCIENCE/PHILOSOPHY
C.H. Waddington (1905-1975) was first contacted by Orwell for a BBC talk in 1942. Peter Davison notes that Dr. Conrad Hal Waddington was at this time Lecturer in Zoology and Embryology at the Strangeways Research Laboratory in Cambridge and from 1947, Buchanan Professor of Animal Genetics, University of Edinburgh. He undertook operational research for Coastal Command, RAF, 1942–45, and was Scientific Adviser to its C-in-C, 1944–45. His recent publications included Introduction to Modern Genetics (1939) and The Scientific Attitude (1941). He also edited Science and Ethics, 1942.
A.J. Ayer (1910-1987) was a philosopher, who like Orwell, was educated at Eton College. They first met in Paris in 1945 when Ayer was keeping watch on the communists for British intelligence and Orwell was on a war reporting assignment for the Observer. You can read his recollections of Orwell here.
Rupert Crawshay-Williams (1908-1977) was as a philosopher, music critic, teacher and writer who contributed to Polemic. (NB A.J. Ayer was on the editorial board of this periodical with Orwell). There appears to be no correspondence with Orwell but further investigations are required as he appears to have resided in Wales, near Arthur Koestler’s cottage of Bwlch Ocyn in the Vale of Ffestiniog.
“Karl’s Friend”
The scribbled annotation on the letter, asking Astor if he “liked Karl’s friend” is contextually an interesting one. Karl is almost certainly Karl Schnetzler (1906 – ). Peter Davison made an editorial footnote in CWGO about Schnetzler who:
“… had been born in Germany in 1906 but had worked in England as an electrical research engineer from 1935 until 1939, when he was interned (although a refugee from Germany) until 1943. He continued to work in England from 1943 to 1956, and became a naturalised British subject in 1948.2 He had been introduced to Eileen at a party at her brother’s house in Greenwich, and he visited the Orwells at their cottage in Wallington on a number of occasions. He also accompanied Eileen when she visited Orwell at Preston Hall Sanatorium, Aylesford, Kent, in 1938. Elisaveta Fen claims in her autobiography, A Russian’s England (1976) that Karl Schnetzler was in love with Eileen (417–18). David Astor, who knew Schnetzler well, maintains that his relationship with Eileen was no more than that of a friend: ‘he respected her very highly.’ Schnetzler was ‘high principled and scrupulous’ and admired Orwell ‘tremendously as a writer and as a human being.’ (Letter to the editor, 25 October 1995.)”.
Possibly Karl’s friend was Helmut Klöse (1904-1987). Orwell described Klöse (in a letter to Vernon Richards on the 10th March 1949) as “the German anarchist who was on the same part of the front as me in Spain and was imprisoned for a long time by the Communists”. Orwell mentions “Karl” in letters to Klöse on the 26th September and 18th November 1946. In the second of these letters, Orwell provided three lists of important books written in English for an anarchist friend of Klöse’s endeavouring to set up a publishing business in Düsseldorf.
In another letter, written during January 1948, Orwell tells Klöse that “Karl & David Astor came & visited me here yesterday, bringing loads of food with them”. On the 5th March 1949, Orwell wrote to Astor from a hospital bed in Cranham:
“The weather has suddenly turned horrible, in fact we are having a regular blizzard. Karl and Klöse were supposed to be coming to see me tomorrow, but I shouldn’t think they’ll get here.”
Schnetzler was one of the mourners at Orwell’s funeral.
16th July 1947
Orwell wrote very few letters in the middle of 1947, although he did manage to make regular entries in his domestic diary. He was focused on drafting Nineteen Eighty-Four, establishing his garden on Jura and raising his son. This letter, written from Barnhill in mid-July 1947, is only one of five that survives from this month. There are just three letters to his agent, Leonard Moore and another to Lydia Jackson.
The letter to Astor covers some familiar territory but also reveals Orwell thought he would be well enough to travel to the USA in late 1948, after Nineteen Eight-Four had been completed. There does not appear – and I need to check more thoroughly so please tell me if you know differently – to be any mention of this plan in other letters or in the biographies. It is also interesting that his estimate of how long it would take to finish the novel – while acknowledging it was “ghastly slow work” and such “a very difficult book to write” – proved to be optimistic even though he had gotten “away from London and journalism”.
There were two medical incidents to report: his son’s stitches for a head wound and that his sister had to be ferried, in dangerous weather to Crinan, after dislocating her arm. Orwell’s domestic diary records the date of the original dislocation as the 6th July and Richard Rees recalled taking Avril to Craighouse due to hurting herself jumping a wall. There is a reference to the second trip – via that boat – the following day! Luckily, considering the infamous incident in the Whirlpool of Corryvreckan, Orwell was not at the helm.
CONCLUSION
David Astor was Orwell’s patron; Orwell was Astor’s mentor. Their friendship was an important one for both men. Astor admired Orwell’s decency and political prescience in recognising the twin totalitarian threats of fascism and communism. Like Orwell, Astor was politically aligned with the anti-Stalinist left.
Astor viewed Orwell’s unadorned, unambiguous prose to be a model for journalists but felt that his friend was not one. Astor told Richard Keeble, during an interview in 2000, that the best thing Orwell did for journalism was his book reviews:
“He was a political writer, a literary critic, but not a journalist.”
Astor famously provided a copy of Orwell’s essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’, to all new Observer journalists.
Astor was deeply involved in many of the significant events of Orwell’s life, especially from 1944 onwards. He supported Orwell to become a war correspondent in the final months of the Second World War and was prepared to send his friend to Burma to cover the country’s transition to independence. Astor was instrumental in Orwell’s relocation to Jura seeking the peace and quiet needed to write a novel. He supported him during the years of hospitalisation for the tuberculosis which would eventually kill his friend.
Astor was able to ensure Orwell’s wish to have an Anglican funeral and traditional burial in an English graveyard was honoured. Orwell was interred in the Astor family plot at All Saints Church in Sutton Courtenay. Many of the writers Orwell suggested to Astor for the Observer in 1946 were in attendance or sent flowers.
REFERENCES
Brooks R., ‘Poet rejects top award’, The Observer, 29 Sept 1991:24.
Cockett, Richard, David Astor and The Observer, Andre Deutsch Ltd, 1992
Fraser, G.S., ‘The burden of technique’, The Observer, 3 Oct, 1948:3.
Fraser, G.S., ‘A Scottish Tacitus’, The Observer, 26 Oct, 1975:31.
Heppenstall, Rayner, ‘Magnificent quadroon’, The Observer, 7 May, 1961:29.
Károlyi, Catherine, A Life Together: the Memoirs of Catherine Karolyi, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1966
Károlyi, Michael, Memoirs of Michael Karolyi: Faith Without Illusion, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1957
Keeble, Richard, Orwell Today, London: Abramis, 2012
Lewis, Jeremy, David Astor, Random Books: Kindle Edition, 2017
Meyers, Jeffrey, Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000
Orwell, George, Smothered Under Journalism: 1946, The Complete Works of George Orwell,, Vol. 18, Davison, Peter (ed.) London: Secker & Warburg, 1998
Orwell, George, It Is What I Think: 1947–1948, The Complete Works of George Orwell, Vol. 19, Davison, Peter (ed.) London: Secker & Warburg, 1998
Orwell, George, Our Job is to Make Life Worth Living: 1949-1950, The Complete Works of George Orwell, Vol. 20, Davison, Peter (ed.) London: Secker & Warburg, 1998
Orwell, George, Orwell: The Observer Years, London: Atlantic Books, 2004
Raine, Kathleen, ‘The Implication of Words’, The Observer, 19 Aug, 1951:7.
Raine, Kathleen, ‘Insight and Vision’, The Observer, 21 May, 1950:7.
Raine, Kathleen, The Land Unknown, New York: George Braziller, 1975
Featured image: © The Jane Bown Literary Estate / National Portrait Gallery, London
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